Talk:Calendar

PROPOSAL: Remove calendar link from navigation bar

• Jasonk 15:45, 10 May 2006 (EDT): I don't think it makes much sense to have a calendar in the side navigation bar. it will either be too cumbersome if many people start using it(i.e. 100's of events a day in different time zones), or otherwise just monopolized by some subgroup. For instance, most of the events now seem to be in the Boston area. Alternatively it could only be an "OWW events only" calendar which would annouce upcoming software upgrades, etc, but then I think it doesn't need such a prominent position. My proposal is to remove the Calendar link from the side navigation bar altogether. Comments welcome.
• BC 16:22, 10 May 2006 (EDT): I think I agree. At the very least, for the calendar to be useful to me, it would need to be in a format to which I can subscribe, such as ical or xml.
  • RS 16:34, 10 May 2006 (EDT): That might be a candidate project for software development ... enable OpenWetWare to host and generate calendars that can be subscribed to via iCal or XML. (I am not sure how hard this is versus how useful it might be.)
• RS 16:34, 10 May 2006 (EDT): One option is to have the current Calendar link point to a page with Boston/San Francisco/London etc. calendars. The current Calendar could be spun off into a Boston calendar given that it is dominated by Boston events right now.
  • Jasonk 16:51, 10 May 2006 (EDT):Not sure a collection of calendars is that useful. I think each calendar may be useful to some subset of people, but I'm not sure I would frequently click the calendar link from the Nav bar to browse calendars in london, etc. Maybe a collection of calendar feeds I could subscribe to as barry mentioned would be slightly more useful, but I think it wouldn't be frequently used enough to deserve a Navbar spot.
  • Kathleen 18:38, 10 May 2006 (EDT): I would like to see an attempt at organizing area-specific calendars. This was something that was done officially in San Diego and it was really great to find out about (and go to) seminars and events at other institutions. I also think that if we had some sort of "main" calendar for conferences and stuff that may be of interest to the community as a whole, that would be great way to announce events that people may want to travel for. Not sure how subscribing to calendars would work. Probably not so well for the non-tech saavy, like me, but that may be an option, too. Whether or not the calendar is on the navigation bar doesn't matter to me one way or the other. I would like to see an organization of calendars, though. Set-up may be a pain, but I think it would be useful in the end. As a start, can we figure out some saucy way to integrate the MIT calendars? Then, maybe we can translate this to other institutions' calendars.

To add a new event

• Click on the date of the event.
• Copy the code below to that day's page.

{{Calendar event|
|title=
|speakername=
|speakeraffiliation=
|time=
|location=
|url=
|abstract=
|hostname=
|hostdept=
|hostinstitution=
}}

• Fill in the fields with your event's information.
• Click to save your event to the Calendar. All relevant pages will get updated.

• Austin 19:08, 17 March 2006 (EST): Perhaps it's better to encourage people to use {{subst:Calendar ...}} instead to be gentler on the server. Especially as we don't really care about events that have passed (so it doesn't matter that it updates as the template is updated). Also the template has a problem that it automatically assumes the url is an external url and not on OWW itself. With a subst, one could make minor edits to it after saving to fix things like this.

Discussion

This looks better than what we currently have under Current events. Assuming this Calendar correctly auto-updates each day, I would be in favor of replacing the Current events page with this. --RS

This page should now update correctly and always be dynamically correct. I had to fix a problem in the code to make sure the cache is no longer used. If someone moves the remaining content on the other page here, we can bury the other page. --Austin 17:06, 17 February 2006 (EST)

I also think this is cool, especially that I can add an event by just clicking on a date rather than editing the whole page. One thing that it currently lacks relative to the current events calendar is that I can't see at a glance what all the events happening in a given month are, I have to click the blue dates.

It might be possible to combine the two features - by using templates, you can automatically insert the text from one page into another page. So the text that is entered on the page for a given date could also show up in the week/month view. Currently you can only insert text from pages in the template namespace but maybe we can give the same functionality to pages in a calendar namespace?--BC 15:02, 16 February 2006 (EST)

You can insert text from any namespace. Try it, e.g. {{User:Bcanton}}. In any case, for having everything show up in the month view, a less hacky solution would be to just change the extension. It really is quite a simple extension. --Austin 15:14, 16 February 2006 (EST)

I was able to hack the extension to display the current month in detail pretty easily. But I'm not sure that's what we want. With the given extension, you can display n days in the future for any n. Isn't it better to display the schedule for the next 30 days than for the current month regardless of where we are in the month? --Austin 15:55, 16 February 2006 (EST)

I think that would be sufficient --Sri Kosuri 19:07, 16 February 2006 (EST)

I like it - it is really nice. But is there any way to get alerted to changes in the calendar (kinda like the "watch" function)? Otherwise how could I coordinate events for the lab with this? Everybody would have to check constantly, which is not really feasible... Smeister 08:19, 3 March 2006 (EST)

I find it very interesting and helpful, but a couple of things are missing to make it really useful for a broader use:

• Be able to set events that repeat themselves every month/year (or even week, etc)
• be able to tag certains events and show a calendar only based on that (similar to a sql syntax 'where tag="bla"'). This would be useful to have a centralized calendar with talks, lab meetings, etc and have a couple of pages displaying only the lab meetings or only the talks, etc. Which extension is it ? It might be really trivial to edit the code to do this -- BA Mar 14 2006

• Austin 12:21, 14 March 2006 (EST): Feel free to hack the extension. I just upgraded the version on OWW from 1.6 to 1.8 with some new features. For your 'tagging' comment, the calender does support merging of calendars. So you could have a calendar for types of events and then have one calendar that import all the calendars you care about together. Repeating events would be nice, but I'm not sure how you would do it with the current structure as every event is simply a page itself. Perhaps a special page that you enter the repeat information and it automatically populates some number of pages with the same information.

• bruno 01:8, 16 March 2006 (EST) Thanks for the link Austin. the ability to merge calendars surely solves one problem - it's the same thing really. If it's a per-page event I don't really see how it can be done... Basically I was thinking about people's birthdays and other cyclic events.
• Austin 09:03, 16 March 2006 (EST): Annual events like birthdays is relatively easy to do with the ability to merge calendars. Just create one calendar for the annual events that doesn't specify the year in the format, only the date and month and merge it in. More complicated cyclic events are probably more difficult.